Social scientists and psychologists are not agreed on why people get so depressed during the holidays. Obviously, a fresh set of completely useless Christmas gifts cannot be the only explanation. One theory is that people know that they have to go back to work, which is enough to depress anyone.

What can be done to make this transition from the festive holidays to the glum realities of the workplace less stressful? A worthwhile suggestion is to avoid watching movies that deal with work and instead rent films like The Blair Witch Project and Braveheart, which have no obvious socio-economic overtones. In the following paragraphs, I will signpost several work-oriented films that should be given a wide berth as the holidays draw to a close.

In the past two years, Hollywood has devoted a great deal of attention to the subject of work. Innocuous piffle like Office Space and Clockwatchers have concentrated on generic working environments, whereas films such as American Beauty, Bringing Out The Dead, Boiler Room, Being John Malkovich, High Fidelity, The Company of Men and Croupier have addressed specific problems associated with specific industries, thus targeting a narrower audience. Hollywood is to be congratulated for its increasing sensitivity to the emotions of the public, many of whom work for a living.

Obviously, movies depicting the spiritual desolation of the workplace are not new. Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times meticulously delineated how machines dehumanized the urban work force, and films such as The Grapes of Wrath painted a searing portrait of life in the agricultural sector. Numerous motion pictures of the 1940s excoriated efficiency experts whose impersonal mathematical models were turning ordinary human beings into automata. But not until Billy Wilder's 1960 The Apartment did anyone in Hollywood get around to addressing the explosive issue of workplace romances.

In The Apartment, Jack Lemmon plays a brown-nosing junior executive who gets ahead by allowing his bachelor pad to be used as a trysting place by his unscrupulous superiors and their inane mistresses. One day, a spurned floozie played by Shirley MacLaine gets so upset at being two-timed that she tries to take her life, using a vial of pills she finds in Lemmon's medicine cabinet. Lemmon arrives home to find the comely young elevator operator at death's door. He is devastated. The responsibility of nursing a mentally unhinged person back to full health would be daunting enough, but what further complicates matters is that MacLaine has been dating Lemmon while simultaneously sleeping with Fred MacMurray, who happens to be Lemmon's boss. The moral of the story seems to be that office romances are fatal, because if your boss's girlfriend winds up dead or even near-dead in your apartment, he is unlikely to give you a raise anytime soon.

Revenge themes have long been a staple of movies dealing with the workplace. In Nine to Five, three clerical workers resort to clever stratagems in an effort to punish their superior for years of insensitivity. In Swimming with Sharks, a good-hearted factotum is so humiliated by his boss that he abducts him and tortures him until his demands for a more respectful work environment are met. And in Working Girl, a complete idiot played with remarkable conviction by Melanie Griffith triumphs over her haughty female superior by using her jaw-dropping lack of intelligence to seduce head honcho Harrison Ford and get a promotion.

All of these movies succeed on their own merits, but none make it any easier to go back to work after the holidays. That's because the characters played by Dabney Coleman, Kevin Spacey and Sigourney Weaver are so much like real-life bosses that they erase the illusion between reality and fantasy. Spacey so closely resembles a man I worked for when I started out in this business that every time I see his photo I want to punch out his lights. This is equally true of the scummy co-conspirators who seduce a lovely, innocent deaf girl in In The Company Of Men. They are vile, they are odious, they are beyond the pale. But most of all, they are instantly recognizable.

One interesting development in contemporary motion pictures is the rise of industry-specific movies. For example, in Bringing Out the Dead, which depicts in chilling detail the unrewarding side of the otherwise glamorous ambulance-driving profession, Martin Scorsese has served up the latest installment in the Cruddy Jobs Tetrology that began with Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (why would anyone want to be a waitress?), Taxi Driver (what kind of a jerk would want to drive a cab?) and Goodfellas (you think being a mobster is all glitz and glamour? Fugheddaboutit).

But Scorsese is not alone in this milieu. In Glengarry Glen Ross, David Mamet pitilessly unveiled the horrors of the real estate business, much as Sam Mendes would later do in American Beauty. The ethical conflicts that lie at the heart of the brokerage business give Boiler Room, The Last Seduction and Wall Street their special power, just as Clerks derives its strength from its merciless dissection of the monotony endemic in the suburban retail sector. In an even more proletarian setting, films such as Hoffa deal with the effect of strained interpersonal relationships on the work force.

Over the years, Hollywood has produced a steady stream of movies showing how stressful it is to be a policeman (Fort Apache, Serpico, The French Connection), a doctor (The Hospital, Madame Bovary, The Island of Dr. Moreau), a lawyer (Philadelphia, The Firm, The Devil's Advocate), a rock star (This Is Spinal Tap, A Star Is Born, Airheads) or an astronaut (Mission to Mars, Red Planet, The Astronaut's Wife). Frankly, these subjects have gotten a bit stale.

What a relief it is to see Hollywood narrowing its focus to examine less glamorous industries. For example, buried beneath the clever humour of Being John Malkovich is a searing indictment of workplace environments that do not conform to even the most minimal ergonomic standards. And once one gets past the cloying love story that dominates High Fidelity, it is possible to discern a dispassionate yet clinical analysis of the way unresolved tensions may contribute to storewide unhappiness in a downscale retail environment.

In the end, what I am trying to suggest is that this genre of movies succeeds all too well at the task it has set itself. Because these films come so close to the texture of reality, they deny the filmgoer the opportunity to escape into a fantasy world where he can find the relaxation and amusement that cinema customarily provides. In my own office experience - buried years in the past - I found that an astonishingly large percentage of my co-workers were at least as annoying as Jack Lemmon in Glengary Glen Ross, at least as predatory as Demi Moore in Disclosure, at least as ruthless as Michael Douglas in Wall Street, and at least as dumb as Melanie Griffith in Working Girl. That's why I don't have a job anymore.

The only way you can really enjoy these movies is if you don't have to work for a living. If you do, stay away from them. Especially around the New Year.